So what I actually said was…

the geopolitically reality is that Russia has always needed to have its effective borders fixed way beyond even Ukraine or - in its own eyes - perish as an identity. — apokrisis

…which means that my point was about how Russia is expansionist as a geographic necessity. And that then has become an enduring identity because of the way history keeps repeating. Invasions keep happening.

Russia must form some kind of multiethnic federation of client states all the way across the steppes to have defensible borders and ocean access. That is the perennial geopolitical context and it generates the justifications needed to pursue the goal. It breeds an enduring mindset.

Putin has been struggling against nationalists for at least ten years. In the Russian context he’s centre-right, and wants to neutralise opposition from the left and the right, either by direct repression or appeasement. — Jamal

Yes. We would hope Putin is still the calculating spook figuring out some workable arrangement to achieve natural security and economic goals. And that he either bangs on about neonazis or imperial Russia depending on what works best with a particular audience.

But a lot of the commentary is that he seems to actually believe in Eurasianism and suchlike these days. He takes things personally and acts erratically. That makes it much harder to figure out accomodating deals and is making Europe pretty certain Putin will continue in reckless fashion.

there's academics like Daniel Treisman — Isaac

Can you cite some actual argument he makes that makes your point explicit? Both you and Beckie are remarkably coy on quoting sources or indeed detailing a counter position in any way.

What article by Treisman do you have in mind?

simply because I don't agree with you. — Benkei

Simply because even when Putin says it himself, you still can’t admit being wrong. :cool:

Some arguments are so vacuous a single sentence suffices to waylay them. — Benkei

Yep, you’ve got nothing, have you. Just a lot of anger and frustration. No rational reply. No sources to back you up.

Your man Putin says it out loud in public and … nothing. Just more insults.

And still the wait for you to back up your claims goes on.

Meanwhile back in the real world….

President Vladimir Putin has compared himself to Peter the Great, saying he shares the 18th-century czar's goal of returning "Russian lands" to a greater empire.

Speaking after visiting an exhibition to celebrate the 350th anniversary of Peter's birth on Thursday, Putin drew a parallel to his invasion of Ukraine.

"Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them," he said, according to a translation from Reuters. "He did not take anything from them, he returned [them]."

Referring to the Ukraine invasion he said: "Apparently, it also fell to us to return [what is Russia’s] and strengthen [the country]. And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face."

"Russian identity is imperialistic". Reality: Russians fleeing mobilisation. — Benkei

That’s something the Vexler video covers. But of course sound bites win over analysis in your world.

While we wait for the apologists to back up their “facts”, here’s another video on the issue worth watching…

Yep. I did read the first 10 pages out of interest. I enjoyed the counter views of frank and apollodorus. And I’m quite happy with critiques of US and UK imperialism. It’s how the world works.

Poor SX just seem go off his head eventually.

So some people think Russia's foreign policy is driven by imperialist expansionism. — Isaac

Great. You will have no problem providing expert sources arguing the opposite then. Look forward to it.

The question was why you want to paint those that do as prophets and those that don't as lunatics. — Isaac

Maybe it’s you and Benkie that are emotionally invested here. So you project a lot.

Right. All this is a commonplace. It is Russia’s story about itself whether Tsarist, Communist, or Putinist.

So why are posters here wanting to deny it?

Are you nuts? The fact is that the view is held and shared as justification for the current actions. The fact is Putin actually says it, even if we can debate how much he really believes it.

All national identities are in some sense fictions. But it ain’t a fiction that all nations have some coherent sense of self that arises from their histories and geopolitical realities. How could it be otherwise?

It is odd that you and others seem so flustered that this context might be openly discussed. What’s going on there? :chin:

What's happening here is just lazy partisanship in place of debate — Isaac

As I said, I only repeated standard wisdom about Russian national identity and how that stems pretty obviously from the problems of defending a sprawling empire composed of many ethnicities on a vast exposed plain.

Pan-Slavism, an ideal of unity of all Slavic Orthodox Christian nations, gained popularity in the mid- to late 19th century. One of its major ideologists was Nikolay Danilevsky. Pan-Slavism was fueled by and it was also the fuel for Russia's numerous wars against the Ottoman Empire, which Russia waged with the goal of liberating Orthodox nationalities, such as the Bulgarians, the Romanians, the Serbs and the Greeks, from Muslim rule. The final goal was Constantinople; the Russian Empire still considered itself the "Third Rome" and it believed that its duty required it to succeed the "Second Rome", which was conquered by the Ottoman Empire.[4] Pan-Slavism also played a key role in Russia's entry into World War I, since the 1914 war against Serbia by Austria-Hungary triggered Russia's response.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_nationalism

And I posted specific sources showing how Putin was invoking this worldview as justification for his series of ever more ambitious military adventures.

According to Michael Hirsh, a senior correspondent at Foreign Policy:
Graham and other Russia experts said it is a mistake to view Putin merely as an angry former KGB apparatchik upset at the fall of the Soviet Union and NATO’s encroachment after the Cold War, as he is often portrayed by Western commentators. Putin, himself, made this clear in his Feb. 21 speech, when he disavowed the Soviet legacy, inveighing against the mistakes made by former leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin to grant Ukraine even partial autonomy. ... Putin is rather a messianic Russian nationalist and Eurasianist whose constant invocation of history going back to Kievan Rus, however specious, is the best explanation for his view that Ukraine must be part of Russia’s sphere of influence, experts say. In his essay last July, Putin even suggested that the formation of a separate, democratic Ukrainian nation “is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us.”

If you believe these are fictions, then get busy with the debunking. :up:

I don't need to provide sources when what you bring to the table aren't facts. — Benkei

Blah, blah, blah. Wake me up when you have sources to back up your opinions.

ou had a whole shtick about Russian identity that was pure fiction. — Benkei

I provided sources. If you want to posture on the issue, then provide the sources that argue against these sources. Kindly put up or shut up

Your error is inferring arguments I'm not making. — Benkei

Where have I claimed that anything you might have said reached the level of an argument. I’ve said exactly the opposite.

Anyone who claims Putin’s war is going to plan is rather hard of understanding. It makes no sense on any level. The incompetence is plain to see.

You’re saying that classical physics approaches counterfactuality, just as it approaches locality. But QM doesn’t actually say whether one, the other, or neither is a basic property. — noAxioms

But QM sets it all up. It says there are two questions that could be asked that would fully dichotomise your coordinate system – your basis of measurement. The catch is – on the finest scale of resolution – you can't ask them both at the same time. The issue of commutative order kicks in.

So QM stands for the division of reality into its complementary extremes – the standard move of metaphysical logic since Anaximander and even before. You have position and momentum as your two crucial measurements that define "something actually happening in the spacetime vacuum".

Or in a less clearly defined fashion – as time remains outside the current quantum formalism – you have the complementarity of time and energy as the coordinate system for measuring quantum action. Another way of looking at "something actually happening in the spacetime vacuum", that then fuzzes out on the fine grain view due to Heisenberg uncertainty.

So QM sets up the bivalent metric that is needed to measure a hierarchically organised cosmos – one which is defined in terms of the classical local~global scale distinction.

Note how position speaks to the local invariance that derives from spin – one arm of Noether's/Newton's conservation of angular momentum principle. And momentum speaks to the other arm of translational coordinate invariance – the matching global view when it comes to measuring some classical difference that ain't in fact a difference, being simply a first derivative inertial freedom, and thus a ground zero as your measurement basis ... in a world that is now explicitly dynamical as rotation and translation are its ground states.

And note how QM sets even this up as the quantum vacuum is never empty, just has some dynamical balance as its ground state. Time remaining outside the formalism is how the world starts already energetically closed ... making QFT a little semi-classical and in need of QG to unite it with the fundamentally open perspective of GR. Another more basic level of cosmic coordinate defining.

Anyway, side-tracked as usual. QM poses its dichotomous question with its commutative order catch. Classical mechanics – the notion of a quantum collapse – then delivers some counterfactually definite measurement.

This is easy to do, due to thermal decoherence, when you stand right in the middle of the local~global divide in terms of measurement scale. Newtonian mechanics is what you see in a low temperature and inertially constrained reference frame. You can measure position and momentum in a way that seem to give you concrete initial conditions and so a deterministic trajectory for every event ... after the "retrocausal" principle of least action has been built into your Newtonianism as Lagrangian mechanics.

But as you head down to the Planck scale, it all gets too small, hot and fuzzy. Your classical coordinate system falls apart.

Well at least to a degree as you can answer one question at a time, if not two. That would be the advantage of QM not actually including time as another moving part of its story, just parking it on the semi-classical sidelines as an informal time~energy kluge that is also quite useful over all scales where time does seem to have a linear lightcone flow – where the general thermal arrow prevails and the fine-scale retrocausal corrections don't cause enough minor temporal eddies to matter.

It is in the sun’s past light cone ... The sun is only sort of in the future light cone of IOK-1. — noAxioms

Yep. There is an asymmetry in the scale terms I just described. Time is the great big flowing river with its irreversible thermal history. The fact that is has all these tiny retrocausal eddies is something that gets washed away in the general big picture view. It is only once you get down to wanting to measure the most local grain of events – as in some set-up like the quantum eraser – that you can measure this other face of time.

Each individual act of thermalisation is its own bit of history. It might take billions of years for a distant galaxy to complete the photonic interaction that allows it to cool down at its end and the sun to heat up by the same amount at this end. Almost all of the radiation by an IOK-1 would be absorbed by some far more local particle. Probably interstellar dust not even light years away.

So really long-distance retrocausality would be matchingly rare as well. The time it took for an 1OK-1 photon to reach us would have impact on the overall statistical flow of the cosmic thermal arrow.

And even then, the arriving photon would look red-shifted by its long journey. We would see that QM had balanced its accounts. The metric expansion of space is included in the equation. That is why radiation gives you extra bang for your thermalising buck. The hot photon is a very cold photon by the time it has retrocausally connected two very distance locales in spacetime and so dissipated some quanta of energy in a decoherently definite, quasi-classical, fashion.

Everett’s interpretation is completely deterministic, but not empirically deterministic since there is no way to predict what you’ll have measured in tomorrow’s observation.
BM on the other hand is deterministic in both ways, and in that interpretation, the sun exists relative at best to the universe, and the relation to IOK-1’s light cones is irrelevant. — noAxioms

Why offer BM and MWI as your orienting dichotomy of interpretations? Both are really old hat sounding these days.

I say it is better to treat collapse and collapseless ontologies as simply mapping out the limits of the real story – the one where there may be no actual true collapse, but then indeed an effective collapse due to thermal decoherence and a relational understanding of QG.

Reality is always contextual and so "collapse" becomes a matter of degree – determined by the scale of observation.

On the finest grain, no collapse can be found. You just have the two questions you would have to answer to give you your bearings in a classically-imagined cosmos.

On larger scales – ones where the spacetime metric is larger and cooler, where lightcones have the time and space to have their equilbrating effect on questions about location and momentum – then a sharp sense of classical reality emerges from the quantum vagueness and uncertainty.

Time appears to flow like a constant c-rate thermal arrow. Space appears to remain as gravitationally flat and thermally even as it ever was – at least on the scale of galactic structure where it all should settle down to a conformal or scalefree metric.

I was going to ask, have you checked out Penrose's twistor model which is an attempt to map everything to exactly this kind of conformal metric – a lightcone view of spacetime?

From IOK’1’s point of view, that’s a counterfactual statement. It’s not meaningful in a local interpretation. — noAxioms

Another little point here. The fact that the photon was absorbed by a detector at one particular point in all the points that it could have hit on the same lightcone is where you find the counterfactuality in the local view.

From IOK-1's point of view, does it give a stuff where its emitted photon lands? It sprayed the wavefunction in every possible direction. There was some probability of it going off in the precisely opposite direction. And even hitting the general vicinity of the experimenter's lab still leaves a lot of scope for narrowing things down.

So the degree of counterfactuality is only maximised – collapsed to its limit – in the sense that the photon landed "here", and not any other "there", on the holographic boundary that is the surface of your lightcone that defines the particle's "past".

BM has that kind of retrocausality as well. — noAxioms

BM is explicitly nonlocal. The problem is that it isn't relativistic without fudging the Born rule. So it has fatal shortcomings.

This is why I lean towards interpretations that are "kind of nonlocal" in a way that is complementary to the way they are "kind of local". That is, dichotomistic interpretations where each aspect emerges as the limit of its "other". So causal sets and other emergent spacetime models like that.

Adlam speaks of the new "all at once" interpretation where accepting nonlocality in both time and space – going further than BM for instance – allows you then to recover your local view in terms of the resulting sum over possibilities.

The principle of least action finally becomes an element of reality, not some spooky teleogy that has to be invoked to make the results come out right in the measurable world.

I got on an airplane that flied well, getting me from proverbial point A to point B. Show me your better airplane — TonesInDeepFreeze

Any bird, bumblebee or dragonfly?

Perhaps maths, like logic and computation, is a view of nature that is accurate if nature were a machine. And perhaps nature is more than just that.

So no problem that you find maths useful. But nature seems larger in ways that still nag at the philosophical imagination.

Hence … systems science.

You're suggesting the FSB singlehandedly overturned military doctrine which is consistent both in NATO and Russia for decades that an offensive force to be successful needs to be at least 3 times larger than the defensive force to be successful more than half of the time and 5 times as large as a prepared, dug in defensive force. — Benkei

I’m merely pointing out the widely reported view that FSB corruption saw funds diverted from creating a network of stooges. That was one more proof that Putin runs a rotting kleptocracy rather than anything resembling a competent superpower.

My error here was in not realising there is a whole bunch of you Putin apologists pushing the crackpot idea that all the Russian set-backs have been part of a grand plan to achieve very minimal invasion goals. Every reverse is a feint followed by a tactical regrouping.

You are welcome to your little circle jerk. Faced with crazies, one backs away

This is definitely how I imagine things to be. — boethius

:yawn:

:razz:

You are imagining you are talking to some unsophisticated soul. I’ve no illusions about how the world really works. I’ve seen how it works up close. I’ve written about it professionally.

In what world does you coming up with a handful of sources become 'every analysis'? — Isaac

Hyperbole seems the appropriate response for this low grade thread. :blush:

This is inconsistent with sending far too few troops to occupy Ukraine. — Benkei

Or instead, the FSB’s expensive network of political stooges were meant to ensure a swift and easy win. But - irony - corruption saw the money going into other pockets, Just as did the funds meant to keep the army’s tanks and trucks in serviceable shape.

Events have shown just how many miscalculations were involved in Putin’s “rational, well planned, limited aims” debacle.

But you can write your own history of the world.

Philip Short’s biography might be the place to start your education.

Strikingly, the occasions Short records when outsiders have witnessed Putin’s inscrutable mask fracture nearly all relate to these “lost” lands, countries whose independent existence was to him an impossible outrage.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jul/03/putin-his-life-and-times-philip-short-review-collapse-that-shaped-man-who-would-be-tsar

Maybe you just haven’t bothered to read up on the subject?

Vladimir Putin has long insisted Ukraine is part of the country he rules.

Kiev is the mother of Russian cities,' he wrote in March 2014. 'Ancient Rus is our common source and we cannot live without each other.' A few days later, Russia completed the annexation of Crimea

'Ukraine is not just a neighbouring country for us,' he told the Russian people in a national broadcast. 'It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space.'

He [Putin] repeatedly denied Ukraine’s right to independent existence … In doing so, he revealed the structures of an imperial ideology with a chronology and ambition that goes far beyond post-Soviet nostalgia to the mediaeval era.

What Putin’s address reveals is the desire to plot Russian and Ukrainian history through the lens of imperialism. He is attempting to establish a direct line from shared ancient origins to a first and second Russian empire: one under the Romanov Tsars (1721-1917) and the second as part of the USSR.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/features/analysis-putins-imperial-ambitions-and-ukraines-300-year-road-statehood

I’m talking about Russian identity. Every country has one. Putin could be just taping into national mythology for cynical advantage. But more worryingly, he seems to rather believe it himself, as his biographers remark.

What a dull and confused reply. Nothing to see here. :yawn:

Don’t be a dope. Every analysis of Putin tells the same story.

Vladimir Putin has compared himself to the 18th-century Russian tsar Peter the Great, drawing a parallel between what he portrayed as their twin historic quests to win back Russian lands.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/10/putin-compares-himself-to-peter-the-great-in-quest-to-take-back-russian-lands

Thanks for the expression of your feelings. I’m sure the argument is in the post.

I'm just not feeling your theory. — keystone

It’s not “my” theory. And likewise, your feelings are irrelevant to the argument it makes. So whatever. :cool:

Authenticity of identity is about social meanings and interpretations. — Jack Cummins

It’s certainly a social construct. :razz:

But space also changes, doesn't it? — Daniel

I was talking about the basic Newtonian conception of space as the context that gives location to objects.

Of course relativity then shows space ain’t an inert and immaterial backdrop. But then that is why it has to be treated in terms of 3+1 dimensional spacetime.

And it is dark energy that would be driving the current metric expansion of the universe under Einstein’s equations. Dark matter is the source of gravitational potential that is instead trying to put the brakes on and collapse the distance between things.

Is biology destiny and to what extent do individuals have the ability to think about authentic meaning beyond the constraints of cultural stereotypes. — Jack Cummins

So you accept it is nature and nurture – biology and sociology? Well then it comes down to the degree these do or should go hand in hand as two levels of the one story. That would define "authenticity" in some pragmatic sense.

If you believe that biology and sociology have no necessary connection, then you will start claiming one or other has to be the basic ground of authentic identity. And if there is a necessary connection – say because a social organism must also be adapted to its world in the evolutionary sense – then that is a different definition of authenticity.

That is the way to approach your riddle. Look to the scientific evidence. Why did biology produce the sexual dimorphism - with its usual genetic degree of variance – that it did? And does sociology continue to reinforce or even amplify that for good adaptive reason? Or has sociology instead radically changed that game so it doesn't really apply anymore. Biology needs to be suppressed as humans are now doing something else with its own evolutionary logic.

The answers will be very complex of course. If our ideas about gender are evolving in some authentic direction, it is still very much a work in progress. Likewise if they are instead just diverging from the biological "true path" for a time, then at what point can this be judged to be the case?

I'm not saying that either story needs to be the right one. Whatever works is what works. But it will sharpen the discussion to at least be clear about how much we must remain biologically constrained, and how much actual logic there is to the idea of being sociologically unconstrained.

And that is why I put the term "authentic" in nose-holding quotes. It already presumes there is some right answer at the end of the road that will make its "other" wrong.

The idea the Russians have poor performance, no plan, irrational, etc. is just completely dumb propaganda. — boethius

So the truth is that Putin is doing a good job executing a rational plan. Sounds legit. :lol:

Ziehan's analysis – that the real ambition is to push all Russia's boundaries back to defensible mountain passes before demographic collapse leaves its armies starved of recruits – is always going to be more plausible.

It's what they've been doing for many years in dribs and drabs under Putin. With a politically disengaged US and a Europe dependent on Russian oil, plus a need to keep the Russian population under his spell, now was a time to see just how much he could grab in terms of a Russian annexation of a connecting Crimean land corridor and regime change in Kyiv.

If the special operation achieved these limited aims in weeks, then onwards and upwards. The geopolitical logic was still the old Russian dream of control of the steppes all the way to defensible borders. That means Poland to the edge of Warsaw, the Baltic States, etc.

So where would you argue halting Putin's ambitions? You would let him eat your hand, but not your arm?

It would be lovely if every one could just declare eternal peace and brotherhood around the negotiating table. But again, the geopolitically reality is that Russia has always needed to have its effective borders fixed way beyond even Ukraine or - in its own eyes - perish as an identity. The leadership can also read the future in terms of the demographics. Even if Putin goes, the same logic will guide those who replace him without the complete democratic overhaul that never happened the last time, and still seems utterly improbable unless it is finally de-nuked and carved back up into ethnic regions too small to trouble the world.

Stop excusing Russia's failed adventure. Give us some real analysis here. What is the least cost off-ramp for everyone now given that Russian weakness has been fully revealed and Europe would be foolish to believe the project to integrate politically and economically could be restarted even in 20 years.

What's an example of a process that doesn't manifest temporally? — noAxioms

Precisely. There couldn’t be in a sense except that - like the Heat Death de Sitter state - it might mark the effective end of measurable change or difference and so time that has “come to a halt”.

This is of course a QM dependent suggestion, but I'm typically going with one of the local ones. — noAxioms

But BM is nonlocal. Any QM interpretation must now incorporate Nonlocality or contextuality of some form.

I would argue that what QM tells us is that counterfactual definiteness is only available in the limit rather than being a basic property of reality. As in decoherence, it emerges with thermal scale. You can get arbitrarily close to the binary yes or no of the classical view of material events, but never achieve actual counterfactuality. As Zeilinger argues, when you get down to commutative variables like position and momentum, you just can’t ask both questions of nature in the same act of measurement.

So generally now, the contextuality that is the nonlocal wholeness is accepted, which makes locality an emergent property. There is no actual wavefunction collapse. But with thermal decoherence, you effectively constrain the indeterminism to a point that is functionally determinate. This effective threshold is down around the nanoscale of quasi classical physics.

The IOK-1 that we see is so far in the past that our sun is nonexistent (not even close to being in its past light cone). — noAxioms

I’m not following. I thought your argument was about us being in its future light cone, hence retrocausality. IOK-1 emits a photon. It eventually strikes an instrument on Earth. A quantum eraser set-up could have become part of the story at any point along its trajectory. Therefore spooky action at a temporal distance of some kind. The future lightcone has to support these kinds of contextual connections. You get a proper sum over histories story and so the local view of time is only the emergent or effective one. The one history remembers because It represented the least action path.

Agree. It does indeed get fun once you put retrocausality into it. I have no hard evidence that this isn't the case, but I'd have a struggle to fit it into my view, which admittedly works better with deterministic mathematics. — noAxioms

Emily Adlam is doing nice work on contextuality and retrocausality - https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.12934.pdf

You don't build the whole from the parts. In my view you go the other way around. You start with the whole and cut it up. — keystone

My systems view says you have to go still further into true holism. You are simply replacing one kind of constructive action - gluing - with an opposite one, that is cutting.

The systems view instead opposes construction to the other thing of constraints. And even here, both construction and constraints arise out of a common unity in vagueness. So the ontology is fundamentally complex. And hence not widely understood by folk.

Anyway, what this means is that my view you do indeed start with the whole that you mean to divide into its constituent parts. So rather than constructing the line from a set of points, I would talk about constraining the line to arrive at the limit where it would become indistinguishable from a point. The interval would be made so small that the length of the line was the same size as the width of the line - both being now effectively zero.

You don’t come at it top down by chopping up a whole line - an infinite number of constructing actions. You come at it top down by increasing the degree of the limitation. Length gets shrunk down to the point that it is no longer possible to be certain about describing it as indeed “a length”.

A line in turn would be arrived at as the constraint on the quality of “plane-ness”. Squish the 2D plane from either side and the limit of its compression becomes how a 1D line arises.

This sets up the basic dichotomy of global constraint vs local construction. And whereas a simple metaphysics, when faced with a dichotomy, demands that you now back one side or the other, a systems metaphysics says the two instead make for a unity of opposites. Each entails the other. Reality is what emerges in a triadic fashion because there is now a world in which top-down constraints enable the existence of local acts of construction - be they cuttings or glueings - and, reciprocally, these local acts of construction generally tend to reconstruct the system of constraints that were shaping them in the first place.

It is a synergistic metaphysics. Constraints define freedoms (as that which ain’t constrained). And freedoms construct constraints, on the whole, as that ensures the continued existence of a world that indeed has precisely those kinds of degrees of freedoms.

An electron is somehow the right kind of fundamental stuff for the laws of the universe to produce. They will keep being produced for as long as they prove a productive way to maintain a universe that has exactly those kinds of laws.

But good luck applying this kind of advanced systems logic to the simplicities of number theory. Peirce did try, but only got as far as a reasonable sketch. He never published the logic of vagueness he was working towards. We have only the notes.

Putin’s escalation plan of infrastructure destruction has now begun in earnest.

Will Ukraine be armed with enough air defence to protect its civilian power grid? Or does the Russian “trash everything you are claiming to liberate” mentality just proceed to its next logical step?

Persisting seems to imply an object contained by time. — noAxioms

No. It is a process manifesting temporality. You are just then projecting your object-oriented ontology on to that.

Time and space are emergent properties in a systems or process philosophy view. The mathematical description of time and space are thus talk of limiting states of being. Everything is a pattern of relations and that then defines limits in terms of the arc from its least developed to its most developed state.

How does your MUH style approach handle the evolution of probabilistic systems which require stuff like least action principles and central limit theorems? Temporality has to be real so a sum over histories can really happen as an evolutionary event.

Stability of the kind that allows talk of objects - mathematical, or otherwise - only emerges once free change has gone to some equilibrium limit where further change ceases to be actual change. Dynamical balance, in other words.

So it is confusing when you seem to back both Rovelli’s active relationalism and Tegmark’s frozen Platonism. It doesn't add up.

Meaningless question as asked. It exists to me but it doesn't exist to say the (arbitrary) galaxy IOK-1 in the state that we see it. The sun (now) measures IOK-1 (then), but IOK-1 (then) doesn't measure the sun (at all). Most existing objects persist for a while. — noAxioms

Gobbledegook. The point was that the Sun is a classic example of something that exists as a dissipative structure. It is formed as the dynamical balance of its gravitational collapse and thermal expansion.

The only relevance of IOK-1 is that it is so far off that it doesn't materially count when it comes to this dynamical balance persisting for billions of years until the fusion fuel runs out. The Sun likewise needs every other significant mass to also be sufficiently far away.

It may share a lightcone with IOK-1 as a few stray ultracold photons may be absorbed into the Sun's dynamical equation. This may even be understood in retrocausal fashion as a real relation ruled by an actual least action sum. But the crucial contextual or relational fact is that the Sun is sufficiently remote from everything else to form its own local "objectness" in being a persistent ball of gas fusion.

It can't not be related to everything all the way out to the cosmic event horizon and so share the same space and time. But what matters is that this cosmic context is in general a statistically empty heat sink in a flat gravitational balance so far as the Sun is concerned. No forces act on it in a way that makes a damn difference to it being a self-organising ball of fusion.

With any realist position, the reality of whatever one suggests to be real is never satisfactorily explained. Why is this 'thing' real and not something else, — noAxioms

Evolutionary arguments are realist. Their mathematical logic is also undeniable. In any ensemble of possibilities, there will be interactions. A collective statistical state will evolve as a consequence. Global order will arise out of chaos just because every interaction becomes some degree of limitation on every other. Complete freedom always averages itself to some collective persistent state just because anything else would be logically impossible.

So a relational view of ontology just gives you a global selection principle for nothing. If something is real, and another is not, you know that some global macrostate favoured the one outcome and suppressed the other in a blind statistical fashion.

And if you believe in quantum retrocausality, it gets even better. The Wheeler-De Witt universal wavefunction could even pluck its own necessary initial conditions out of its past. The dissipative structure of the future cooling~expanding heat sink Cosmos could act as the constraint selecting for that kind of Big Bang beginning. The ends did justify the means.

A dissipative structure (especially a deterministic one) defines all its future states. That it actually plays out these states (structure contained by time) or not has no effect on those states. — noAxioms

Well if you smuggle in the qualification of "determinism" then sure, you recover an ontology of that kind.

But I thought I was explicit. My view follows Peirce in regarding indeterminism (or logical vagueness) as fundamental. Determinism is what evolves in the systems approach. You have the emergence of global constraints that shape local freedoms. You have a fixity of cosmic law and some persistent grain of local action. You get the Universe as we actually find it – a limit-based story of global symmetries and their local invariances.

I'll take a look at structuralism. I've actually been looking and have failed to put a name to what I'm trying to convey. Surely somebody else suggests such a thing. — noAxioms

I have to say that you seem to be trying to fuse two polar opposite ontologies. One is based on static existence – it just moves its objects from the real world to some Platonic realm. The other is based on cosmic darwinism and self-organising emergence. Stability is merely a state of well-regulated change. Existence is a process of achieving a long-run dynamical balance.

Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? — noAxioms

The lack of a satisfactory answer to this challenge is why I had to abandon such realism.[/quote]

So is your claim that there is no why, and so that leads you to some kind of idealism rather than the usual realist response, which is to shrug and say anthropically, it is what it is?

You need to join the dots and spell out your alternative. The OP has no clear argument that I can see.

If you balk at the term “existing”, then why isn’t “persisting” an improvement?

To exist does require some kind of grand reason. It does seem like a big effort to create something and one can always wonder, why bother?

But to persist is simply to keep going because it can’t really be helped. Persistence embodies its own reasonableness. It is already to be bothered enough.

Does the Sun exist or persist? Is it always having to give an answer as why it even bothers to continue or is that simply an inevitability given that it embodies a dissipative structure that must play out its unfolding pattern in time?

If you switch from the object-oriented ontology you criticise to a process or structuralist ontology, then you don’t have to abandon realism quite so quickly. Structuralism also had the advantage that it sounds half-like idealism to a lot of folk anyway. :razz:

You seem to be well read in math, philosophy, and science. Out of curiosity, what are you trained in? — keystone

My focus is systems science. Which means all of the above really. But neuroscience in particular.

No computer processing can make the image higher resolution than reality. — keystone

The point was that the processing removes vagueness - the unlimited number of shades of grey - by imposing a binary, black and white, constraint on the image. It boils faces down to a grid of points representing exact distances between the most informative features.

But if you just want to resist the concept of vagueness, that’s your lookout. I can only say it was about the single most paradigm shifting thing I ever learnt.

For a fully accurate depiction, the line width should be exactly 0. — keystone

LOL. Just as the cuts in the line should be exactly 0 length. Your arguments here seem all over the place.

How do you glue actually 0D points together to make a continuous line? How do you glue 0D width lines together to make a plane?

The issue to be resolved is how divisibility can co-exist with the continuum that it divides. That is where my point about the discrete and the continuous being a dichotomy that emerges from a logical vagueness comes in. It justifies treating both the cutting and the gluing as complementary limits on actuality. The infinite and the infinitesimal are two ends of the one spectrum of possibility.

But I can’t see what your answer is at all.

First of all, the universe is treated like an object, which seems a complete category error. — noAxioms

Secondly, Hawking begs a very strong bias that the universe (category error aside) has in fact gone to the bother of existing. He should first have asked "Does the universe go to all the bother of existing?". — noAxioms

From the point of view of Aristotelean hylomorphism, Peicean semiotics, ontic structural realism, etc, the Cosmos is not an object, but a process. It doesn’t exist but persists. It isn’t created but it develops. And it is substantial in its being due to being the intersection between structural constraints and material possibility.

So in this view, you start from a material vagueness or everythingness - a quantum foam of possibility - and this then reacts with itself to become a more limited and stable arrangement of somethingness. Existence evolves in a least action or path integral fashion where everything cancels down to whatever definite form can stabilise the situation and make for an orderly Universe unfolding in dissipative fashion in an emergent spacetime.

This says the essence of the Universe is best captured in mathematical models of its structural principles. It is all about symmetry and symmetry breaking as this is how a stable order can emerge from pure instability. Maths does a good job speaking about the system of constraints that are the necessary aspect of a reality that self selects for its long run persistent order.

But then there must also be the material potential as that which “breathes fire” into the equation. There must be quantum action or hot fluctuation to give the constraints the initial state of disorder to tame, in some sense.

This too could be mathematically modelled we would hope. Or at least logically and metaphysically modelled. But it is the slipperier side of the story.

For example, how can time adjust the speed of light to make it the same for all observers when time does not exist. — val p miranda

Where is it being said in relativity – as a theory of spacetime coordinates – that time doesn't exist or that time adjusts the speed of light?

You are making arguments based on your misunderstandings, not on the metaphysical implications of the scientific theory.

I believe that cuts made to a continuum are perfectly precise since I can draw it with no vagueness. For example, consider this drawing of y=0 and y=x^2-2:

There's no blurriness to my drawing. However, when I start to measure it (usually through calculus), my measurements may be imprecise. — keystone

This is Russell's argument. This photograph of Keystone's face might be blurred, but Keystone's face itself is not. Therefore vagueness is merely epistemic and not ontic. It exists in our representation of reality and not reality itself.

But the reverse argument also applies. The representation can be sharper than what it represents. The right facial recognition algorithm could separate a dim CCTV image of Keystone in a hoody from all the other faces stored in a police data bank. Signal processing can extract structural information that stands behind any amount of confusing surface detail.

So sure, one can eliminate vagueness by using well-defined algorithms like your equations. They are linear and not non-linear after all. Errors in measuring initial conditions don't matter as the uncertainty only grows in polynomial time and not exponentially.

But how wide are your lines – even mathematically? How sure are you they are single lines and not a small bundle of lines sharing a neighbourhood with infinitesimal spacing? And when does this vagueness start to matter? Doesn't it matter if your rigorous mathematical edifice must also fit a physical world were nonlinearity is in fact the generic condition?

So having signal processing to sharpen up your view of an uncertain world is great. Really useful. We can see why maths is "unreasonably effective" in that regard.

But that doesn't engage with the foundational issue of whether reality itself is vague or crisp at base. And hence what kind of ontology we are correct to import into our "picturing" of math's epistemology.